One year of Scrum - Lessons Learned

This is a series of posts that will focus on seven key lessons I've learned over the past year of implementing and coaching scrum.

I became interested in Agile development in 2000 after failing at every other approach I’d ever tried: waterfall, RUP, drawing UML diagrams (I spent a lot of time perfecting the diagrams and less producing a working product).

In Jan 06 a team I was a member of started doing daily standups during a crisis. When the problem was solved we decided the standups had been effective at sharing information so we decided to keep them. After a reorg in Oct 06 we decided to start iterations and add regular Planning, Review and Retrospective meetings. So began our journey with Scrum.

Lessons Learned

• Working at a distance is hard
• Good Agenda's make for great meetings
• A great Product Owner is key
• Embrace Failure
• Build Trust first
• Light Touch Leadership is required
• Healthy builds matter

I will post the details of these lessons at the rate of one or two a week until I'm done.

Programming note - the focus of these posts will not be cheer leading. Scrum has worked for us - if it didn't we wouldn't keep doing it. Instead the focus will be on the things that were hard

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